I rested my head against the window, drowsy from a long day, full tummy, and steady hum of the train. My husband sat next to me absorbed in a game. It’s a long ride from San Francisco, where we work, to Pleasanton, where we live. I thought I might take a nap.

A disembodied voice crackled, announcing the next station: “West Oakland.”

The train stopped, the doors opened. I watched the passengers. The train car was about half full. A few people got off. Three black youths, a girl and two boys, got on. They were talking animatedly, happy. All three were well-dressed: fashionable clothes that looked new and fit well. Tight black pants. Caps. A little bling. They’d taken the time to look nice, and they were out for a good time.

One of the boys sat while the girl and the other boy stood, balancing by holding onto the straps suspended from the ceiling of the car. They talked and joked together. I felt a little voyeuristic watching them share this private moment of fun, but I couldn’t help myself. I was too taken with their delight and energy. Their faces lit with joy as they laughed. The girl and the boy hung from the straps and swung their weight around, enjoying the interplay of gravity and momentum of the train and their own upper body strength.

The girl clung to the strap then braced her other hand on the side of the train. Walking her feet up the train side, she executed an impressive flip. She did it again, obviously pleased with herself. “You try doing that in heels!” she crowed. She did it again. I noted with admiration that she was wearing boots with 5″ heels.

I guessed the kids to be somewhere between 15 and 20. It’s an in-between age. Young enough to treat a train as a jungle gym but old enough for a night out on their own. I thought about my own kids, about the same age.

The disembodied crackling voice announced the next station: Lake Merritt. The train stopped. The kids stayed on. The train started again. The train abruptly came to a screeching halt. “That’s not good,” the passenger in front of me muttered. I looked around but couldn’t tell why we were stopped. I leaned my head back against the window; my husband stayed immersed in his game. The trains don’t run on time here. Stopping wasn’t unusual.

Two BART police officers stepped onto the car. Another guy, a passenger, trailed behind them. The passenger with the cops said something I couldn’t hear and gestured toward the three youths. He was a mousy white guy in a button-down oxford shirt, corduroy pants, and a fleece vest. He looked like the kind of guy who drives an SUV with Save the Planet bumper stickers.

The first police officer addressed the youths. “There’s been a complaint. I need you to step off the train.”

“What’s the complaint?” the girl asked.

“We didn’t do anything,” the boy said.

“There’s been a complaint,” the police officer insisted. “Please come with me.”

“What’s the complaint?” the girl repeated.

The mousy passenger who had made the accusation faded back. I didn’t see where he went. Now it was just the cops and the kids.

“We got a complaint that you were asking for money.” The cop’s voice carried.

“We didn’t do anything!” the boy repeated, louder.

“Please come with me,” the cop insisted. “This train can’t move until you get off.”

The crowd on the car grew restless, impatient. The two cops flanked the three youths and attempted to escort them off the train. For a minute, it looked like the kids were going to comply. The boy who was seated stood, headed toward the open door, but then changed his mind. “I didn’t do anything. I was just sitting there,” he said. He got back on the train.

The girl’s face had gone from joy to furor. “It’s that racist white guy,” she yelled, loud enough for the whole train car to hear. “We didn’t do anything, but he thinks we did because we’re black.”

A passenger stood up, Asian, “They really didn’t do anything,” he said to the cops. Then to the kids: “Let’s just step off the train so they can make their report.”

By this time I was on the edge of my seat. It was so unfair. These kids were just out for a good time. They had done nothing besides being full of energy and life. They hadn’t asked for money. They were being harassed by the cops for something they had not done.

I’m still not sure what made me decide to act on my sense of injustice. Maybe I arrogantly thought the police would listen to me, a middle-class, middle-aged, white woman. Maybe I saw the faces of my own kids in the black youths and imagined them being detained on hearsay. Whatever the trigger, I stood up, moving past my husband who looked at me quizzically. I walked up the train aisle to the officer who had been barking orders.

“Sir, they really didn’t do anything. They just got on at the last stop.” My voice was steady. Calm. Quiet. Pitched for the circle of people involved, not for the rest of the train. Internally I was amazed that my adrenaline wasn’t amped up, that my voice was not shaking. I don’t normally confront cops. It is not at all like me to tell a cop how to do his job. I couldn’t believe I was confronting a cop and not even nervous about it.

By this time the crowd on the train was growing antsy. A few were calling for the kids to get off the train so they could get where they were going, but far more were calling for the cops to leave the kids alone. Several more passengers stood up and started shouting at the cops:

“These kids didn’t do anything!”

“Leave them alone!”

“Racist white guy can’t tell blacks apart!”

“It must have been someone else!”

“Let the kids go!”

I felt self-conscious standing in the middle of everything. I’d played my bit part in the unfolding drama. I returned to my seat.

A woman on the other side of the car leaned over toward me, “I could have done that,” she said. She was white like me, graying hair cut shoulder length in a bob. She looked like she could live in the house next door in my white-picket-fence neighborhood.

“I’m sorry?” I was confused by her words. What does that even mean, I could have done that? If you could have why didn’t you? Did she mean that she could not have done what I did?

“I could have done what you did,” she repeated.

I smiled and nodded. I didn’t know what else to say.

My attention turned back to the growing situation. More passengers had stood up to defend the kids. Another BART police officer entered the car. The increasing tension and buzz from the crowd made it hard to hear. I realized that there were several more police officers waiting on the platform. The situation had escalated rapidly. This could become ugly.

“CHECK THE BUCKET,” the girl shouted.

For the first time I noticed that the kids had an amplifier and a bucket with them, and suddenly I saw a missing piece of the puzzle. The kids were street performers. They weren’t out for a night of clubbing. They were dancers.

Sometimes street performers come onto the BART trains. They strut up and down the aisle, put on a show, and ask for money. I personally find being a captive audience to these shows annoying. I never give the performers money because I don’t want to encourage it. But I did not realize that such behavior warranted police intervention on this scale.

Nor did I think that these kids had been dancing for money on this train. I looked around for the accuser but couldn’t see him.

I was incensed by the entire situation. The accuser had disappeared, the situation was escalating, and these innocent kids were now targets.

“This isn’t right,” I told my husband. I stood up, shouldered my backpack in case I decided to leave the train, and pushed past my husband’s knees for the second time. Without even thinking about whether or not my husband would follow me or would be upset with me for getting involved, I stepped into the situation again.

I sidled up to the cop who had originally been barking orders and who was now standing between the kids and the rest of the passengers.

“They really didn’t do anything,” I said into his ear. “They didn’t. This isn’t right. I will be happy to make a statement. What can I do to help?”

The cop turned to me. “They might not have done anything originally,” he said, “but now they are resisting. If they don’t get off the train we will have to arrest them.”

Another police officer entered the train. The mood of the passengers was growing dark, roiling. It became a palpable thing, shifting energies threatening to spill over into violence. My stomach fluttered.

I turned around, realized that half a dozen people had their cell phones out, recording the incident. I idly wondered if I would show up on youtube videos. I decided I didn’t care. This wasn’t right and I wouldn’t stand for it. These kids were being detained, harassed, and possibly arrested all because the mousy guy in the fleece vest didn’t like being bothered by dancers panhandling on BART. These kids might have danced on BART at some point, but not tonight, not on this train. They didn’t deserve this.

Another officer entered the train. It was now five officers to the three kids. The Asian passenger who had originally stepped up to intervene turned to the kids, “Why don’t we get off the train and get this handled. Then we can all get onto the next train.”

The police closed their circle, puffing themselves up, herding the kids to the exit. I followed them to the door. I was about to step off the train. I turned back to see if my husband was paying attention. He was staring at me, his face open, questioning. “This isn’t right,” I mouthed at him. He stood up, following me.

I turned my attention back to the kids. The cops had one of the boys in an arm lock and pressed him up against the wall of the station. It looked like it hurt. They had the girl surrounded. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her screaming. I heard another voice — the other boy? the Asian passenger who had intervened? a cop? — telling her “This isn’t worth it. Stop struggling.”

I stepped off the train onto the platform.

The cops who had the girl surrounded had her hands behind her back. She was struggling and screaming. They began half pulling, half dragging her down the platform toward the station exit. “LET GO OF ME,” she shouted. “LET GO OF ME LET GO OF ME LET ME GO!”

An officer stood in the middle of the chaos just looking, sizing it all up. He was new on the scene. He was also the only officer not in the middle of the chaos. I walked up to him. “Sir, they didn’t do anything,” I said. I watched his face. Dark skin. Brown eyes. A guy who’d been having a quiet night. He turned to me.

“You’re a witness?” he asked.

“Yes sir. I was on the car. These kids didn’t do anything. This isn’t right.” The girl was still screaming. Each panicked shriek felt like shrapnel in my soul. That could be my daughter, I thought. So very not right. “I will be happy to make a statement,” I said.

“OK,” the cop replied. He took out a notebook, asked me my name. He had to ask me to spell my last name a second time. I handed him my driver’s license to make things easier for him. He started taking notes, then looked up at my husband and me. “I left my recorder in my office,” he said. “Would you be willing to go there to make a statement?”

I agreed immediately. To my surprise, my husband agreed as well. “Of course,” he said. We would probably be an hour late, or more, getting home. This was worth it.

We followed the officer off the platform, past the turnstiles, and through a door marked “authorized personnel only.” He led us down a maze of corridors, past a bank of cubicles, and into his office. As promised, he took out a recorder and interviewed us for a verbal statement. My husband and I each told our version of the events. They lined up. Each of us emphasized that the kids had done nothing wrong.

“Let me just clarify a few points,” the officer said after we finished our statements. “In your opinion, did the officers use excessive force at any time?” I said they had, citing the painful hands-behind-the-back restraining technique and the panicked girl screaming. My husband said they had not, but pointed out that the officers should have just let the kids go when so many passengers testified that the kids were innocent.

The officer asked a few more questions: had the officers used mace, batons, or physical violence on the kids? had they acted unprofessionally?

We finished the interview, the officer escorted us back into the station, said that internal affairs would probably be contacting us in connection with the investigation, then said goodbye.

As we waited for the next train, I played over the evening in my mind.

I realized that the statements we made existed only on a recorder in the cop’s office. The kids wouldn’t know we made the recorded statement. If they got lawyers, the lawyers wouldn’t know. Our testimony might never be heard by anyone involved in the case against the kids.

The more I played over the questions that the officer had asked us, the more I realized that the questions were all about the conduct of the other officers, not about the kids and their innocence.

The internal affairs investigation would, no doubt, turn into a huge deal. The situation had escalated so rapidly, fueled by racial tension. So many people had recorded videos. The train had been halted for 15 minutes or more. Passengers were irate. There would be much attention on the conduct of the cops.

I didn’t care about the cops. I wanted to help the kids.

Somehow, I doubted that I had.

Next time I see dancers on BART, I’m giving them whatever is in my wallet. I’ll think of it as their defense fund.

When I wrote my blog post a few weeks back celebrating 15 years in business, I had no idea that in a few short weeks I would be making sweeping changes. I knew I was restless in my current work, and also tired of being on the road all the time. But I did not realize how ready I was for a major change.

Hoo-boy, was I ready for change though. Rapid, sweeping change. Folks who follow me on Twitter know that in the last couple of weeks, I’ve: delivered my PragProg book Explore It!, to production; started a new job at Pivotal Labs; and closed down both Agilistry Studio and my consulting practice, Quality Tree Software, Inc.

I’ve posted farewell letters on both the Quality Tree and Agilistry Studio websites. You can read those for details about those closings. Eventually, however, I’ll be taking those websites down. This site will be my primary web presence.

I want to take a moment here to talk about what’s next for me.

My new job means that I won’t be training or consulting any more, nor do I intend to participate in many conferences for a while. There’s just so much for me to do and learn with my new job that I don’t have the mental bandwidth for anything else for the foreseeable future.

That said, I do intend to keep pushing the boundaries of software testing and overall development practices. I believe that the traditional software QA model is fundamentally and irretrievably broken. It’s time for new models. I want to figure out how to articulate those new models simply, and I hope that my work at Pivotal Labs will help me do that.

In the coming months, I might be writing here more. Or not. I’m not sure yet. We’ll just have to see how things go.

I was unaware of BritRuby until it was canceled. Even if I’d known about it, I couldn’t have participated. So if you think this is a post about BritRuby itself, it’s not. I don’t have an opinion one way or another about BritRuby or their speaker lineup.

But here’s why I do care: because I think it’s deeply unfortunate that anyone is blaming a Twitter conversation about diversity for the cancellation of the conference. That’s absurd. The issue is not whether the Twitterverse has an opinion. The issue is that sponsors pulled out.

Hang on, let’s back up a step.

The official statement on the BritRuby website said, “Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues.” And there’s a bunch of Twittering about how people were dogpiling on BritRuby.

Figuring things must have gotten really nasty, I went searching for the smoking gun on Twitter.

I couldn’t find it.

Where were the activist bullies? Where were the accusations of sexism or misogyny? I found none of that. Instead I found expressions of regret:

There were no flame fests, no diatribes. The more I dug, the more it seemed like a relatively mild discussion on Twitter got reflected back and turned around until people who expressed their opinion were being attacked viciously in tweets with words like “Shame on you” and “Disgusting” and “You ruined everything.”

It appeared that the mere question of diversity had a polarizing effect, dividing people into Us v. Them without anyone actually having thrown the first stone.

Ultimately, that’s why I care and why I am wading into the fray myself. If we cannot talk about diversity issues openly, we cannot address them. So attempting to shut down discussion of the issue, to shame people into silence, is the same as actively opposing diversity.

If you personally choose not to address diversity issues, that’s fine. Don’t address them. Keep your own silence. But don’t expect that others will ignore the issue just because you want to ignore it. Don’t ask them to be silent.

If you become fed up enough to wade into the general mayhem and express your opinions, do a little research first. Don’t fly off the handle at accusations that someone said something. Find the original quotes. Respond to actual statements, not to incendiary reactions to over-reactions to original statements.

What is at risk here isn’t just a conference. It’s something much bigger: the ability to discuss very real, very personal issues in an open forum.

Still seems pretty mild to me; not nearly enough to bring down a whole conference all by itself.

But wait, it gets better. Laurent then searched to find the reactions to the original comments. It’s those reactions where folks reframed the original comments using trigger words like “sexism” and “racism.” See Laurent’s link for details.

Now, I hold no love of the ISTQB. I don’t see any correlation between ISTQB certification and tester competence. I think an awful lot of what the ISTQB promotes as “best practice” is at best context-dependent and at worst actively damaging. But that’s a topic for another post, one I probably will never write. It’s just not worth the energy. I don’t feed that which I don’t want to see grow.

But my point is that I don’t put any stock in anything the ISTQB says, so I was absolutely stunned to find that I agreed with a statement in an ISTQB syllabus.

So I replied, “Whodathunk I’d agree w/ istqb. Unless org sells test svcs, its is a means to an end, a way to get info.”

That touched off a small storm of responses, some agreeing, but many more disagreeing. I’ve been replying to the objections on Twitter, but I think this topic needs more than 140 characters.

First, a few clarifications:

1) I am talking specifically about software development.

2) I am talking about business value.

3) Business value is inextricably linked with increased revenue or decreased costs. That’s not decreased costs of software development. It’s overall decreased costs that can be attributed to the use of the final delivered software.

So the value in software development rests in the final result—the delivered product or service—not the process or activities that went into making the result.

Testing does not have value on its own. Neither does programming. I have seen more than one team crank out lots of code and yet be unable to ship a product anyone would buy. For that matter, designing doesn’t have intrinsic value either.

“But wait!” you say. “Testing does have value. Customers pay more for better quality software, so testing has value.”

Well no. First, it’s not clear that customers pay more for better quality software. Customers are less likely to abandon better quality software in a fit of rage. But they don’t necessarily pay more for the kind of quality that comes from having testers do more testing. Further, testing does not automatically lead to better software. In fact, better testing can actually lead to worse software. Finally, as Ron Jeffries pointed out, testing only adds value to the extent that the team uses the information that testing produced in order to improve the software.

But that’s not even the main point here. The main point is that testing and programming and designing and all the other activities that go into making software are all just a means to an end. As UCLA coach John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”

The bottom line is that if you want your work to have value, make sure that the software you’re working on ships and satisfies customers. The final result is a whole team effort. The team succeeds or fails together. And the value of the work you’re doing is stuck at 0 until the software you’re working on is in the hands of paying customers.

I was going through some of my old notes yesterday and stumbled across a sketch I made of a diagram of effects showing how test managers become ineffectual. (I re-created it in Illustrator since no one but me could have read my original sketch.)

I’d like to say that back when I was a test manager I never succumbed to this cycle. Alas, I’m sure I did. It’s almost inevitable.

Reading through those old notes was a good reminder about why I don’t manage independent QA/Test groups anymore.

I’d much rather work with organizations to integrate testing activities throughout the cycle and across all roles. The traditional role of a test manager in organizations that practice test-last development is a miserable job. Add in a sprinkle of dysfunctional QA blaming while simultaneously undercutting any efforts the QA manager makes to increase quality? The job becomes a recipe for depression and substance abuse.

I have wasted countless hours of my life arguing to fix bugs in bug triage meetings.

Bug advocacy is a core skill for testers in traditional software development organizations that follow code-then-test practices. Over time, I got reasonably good at it. I could explain to both business and technical stakeholders not only the symptoms of the bug and steps to reproduce it, but also the corresponding impact to users. I could help my internal stakeholders see the connection between the risk that the bug represented and the core value of whatever system we were working on. In short, I became adept at making a business case to fix bugs.

It was awful. I hated every minute of it.

Every bug triage meeting was torture. They were long and contentious. I didn’t understand then, nor do I understand now, why an organization would bother spending so much time and money on testing if they weren’t going to do anything with the information that testing revealed.

These days I choose to do hands-on-the-keyboard work only in organizations where they value clean code so highly that I don’t have to draw on those bug advocacy skills.

But even now, there is a mistaken notion in the software development community that bugs are inevitable, that you can’t fix them all, and that it makes sense to make a fix/defer decision on bugs based on some notion of ROI.

This line of thinking is a deathtrap.

It might be a slow, lingering death. It might, in fact, be such a slow death that it’s not apparent how each defer decision is bringing death for the product, or company, a little closer. But once we start down the apologists path of deferring “minor” bugs in mountainous inventories of defect backlogs, we’re inviting a sinister guest into our midst.

If you think I’m being overly dramatic, consider this: two of the companies where I spent the most time in bug triage meetings are now dead. So I think I know a deathtrap when I see it. Let me share their stories.

One of the companies sold software directly to consumers. The other was a paid service with a software component distributed through large OEMs. In both cases we “didn’t have time” to fix all the bugs. There were always higher priorities. We had to get features out. We had to make deadlines. We had to respond to customer demands.

In both cases the executive staff impressed on us that every day we delayed a release incurred a massive cost. They pushed us to be pragmatic. Reasonable. Make good business decisions about tradeoffs.

The executives were not wrong. Both companies were in rapidly changing markets where speed was critical. In the case of the company that sold to OEM partner companies, the deadlines were incredibly real. Miss the drop date by even a single day, and we wouldn’t be on the platform. That meant we wouldn’t see revenue on that platform for another 6 months.

Under such conditions it’s easy to see how we made the decisions we did.

But remember, both companies are dead.

It wasn’t the bugs that killed us directly. Rather, the bugs became a pervasive infection. They hampered us, slowing down our productivity. Eventually we were paralyzed, unable to make even tiny changes safely or quickly.

Whenever we considered the question of whether to defer or fix a bug, we looked at the obvious costs associated with releasing software with known bugs: annoyed customers, tech support, and the overhead associated with releasing patches for the most egregious cases.

We were right about those costs. So we weren’t surprised when the resulting interruptions and escalations forced us to split our efforts between new development and maintenance. We just hired more people to keep up with the increased demands and told ourselves that it was the cost of doing business in the software industry.

However, it was the hidden costs that drained us of life: hours lost arguing about bugs in bug triage meetings; hours lost stumbling over the same known issues again and again; hours lost fighting with a fragile and error-prone code base to make even small changes; hours lost cataloging and categorizing the backlog. It was demoralizing and immensely expensive.

All those hours leached away, drained our capacity. We could see it happening but were powerless to stop it. By the time we realized how much trouble we were in, it was too late. The infection had taken root and nothing short of a total overhaul of the entire code base would make things better.

The consumer software company eventually died because a more nimble competitor came along. We simply could not keep up with the changing market demands in a rapidly evolving field.

The OEM partner died because we just couldn’t generate enough revenue. What little revenue we had disappeared as one-by-one, the large OEMs dropped us. The OEM’s internal staff had no faith in our software so when their customers complained to their tech support, the OEM tech support blamed our software.

There’s a lesson here about the real cost of tolerating bugs, of supporting practices that involve triaging defects. The cost of carrying a bug is far far greater than most people realize. That trivial little “cosmetic” issue will cost a little time to fix. If you have to argue about whether or not to fix it, then track it, then revisit it, then prioritize it, then argue again about whether to fix it or defer it yet again, you will spend hours upon hours on it.

This is why I have no patience for the “bugs are inevitable; you can’t fix them all” attitude. Bugs kill. They do it slowly, painfully, but relentlessly.

Want your software to evade that horrific death?

Cancel all the bug triage meetings; spend the time instead preventing and fixing defects. Test early and often to find the bugs earlier. Fix bugs as soon as they’re identified; attend to your broken windows early.

And whatever you do, don’t accept the apologist’s excuse that bugs in production are inevitable, so the only pragmatic approach is to make a cost/benefit decision on whether or not to fix them. The cost is almost always far higher than anyone might guess.

I have been blogging even less than usual because all my writing time is going into a book that hasn’t been formally announced yet. I’ll have official news soon.

Last month marked the 15 year anniversary of my decision to go into business for myself.

Over the last decade and a half I have learned so very much, and had the opportunity to work with so many amazingly cool people. I feel immensely grateful. I’ve also had my challenges: strategic and financial missteps that cost me dearly. The cumulative result has been a carnival ride of emotions: panic, joy, mounting despair, satisfaction, panic, glee, giddy bouncy happy glee, disappointment, hope.

This being in business stuff is not for the faint of heart.

Because I’ve been in business so long, aspiring consultants sometimes ask me for advice. So I’ll tell you what I tell them:

Be prepared to work. Hard. Harder than you have in your life, and for less pay.

Some people think being a consultant is easier or cushier or more lucrative than having a “real job.” They see the hourly or daily rates that consultants charge, do the math to calculate an equivalent salary, and see buckets of shiny money. Or they equate independence with getting to work only when they want to, and on whatever they want to.

Certainly there are independent consultants who have structured their businesses to optimize for wealth, freedom, or both. You might succeed at doing that. But you need to know before you start that it’s a really long road between hanging out your shingle and spending 6 months every year lying on a beach.

Clients don’t just line up automatically ready to write you big fat checks for doing whatever you feel like. First, you have to find clients. When you’re first starting out that will be harder than you think. Then, in order to land your first few clients, you are likely to have to take gigs that aren’t exactly your ideal.

Out of your first 12 months in business, you will spend about a quarter your days doing billable work, the other three quarters trying to get billable work, and the other half of your days splitting your time between attending to the minutia of running a business and connecting with people in ways that won’t get you billable work immediately but might in 18 months.

Yes, I am aware that is 150% of your time. That’s roughly what it takes.

Later when you’re more established, the balance will shift. You’ll have more billable work and have to spend less time and energy scrambling to get your next gig. So it goes from 25-75-50 to something more like 50-50-50. Or, if you opt for a business model with longer engagements (e.g. contracting) you might end up at 75-25-50. If you want a business that involves shorter engagements and more time to work on pet projects (training, short term consulting), you might end up with a ratio that looks like 25-25-100.

Notice that the overall effort is still 150%. If you want a lifestyle business where you can put in 75% of the effort you would put into a job working for someone else, expect to get something like 10% of the revenue.

The bottom line is that running a business, any business, is hard.

I am friends with a variety of small business owners across a range of industries. We all have one thing in common: we work our backsides off to make our businesses go.

What people who don’t run businesses don’t understand is that the part of the business they see is just the front of the stage. They don’t see behind the scenes: the long nights spent juggling numbers, trying to predict and balance cash flow. They don’t see all the preparation that goes into the delivery of the product or service. They don’t see the duck legs frantically paddling below the surface; they just see the serene quacker gliding across the water.

As a business owner, there will always something that needs your attention urgently. Stuff happens. Problems crop up. Things don’t go as planned. So between handling emergencies, serving existing clients, meeting new clients, reviewing contracts, writing up the statements of work or proposals, growing your own skills so that you stay relevant in an ever changing market, invoicing, managing logistics, developing content, and attending or presenting at conferences, you will not have an actual vacation for years.

You might travel on business and squeeze out a few hours, or maybe even days, to see the sights. You might take a day off here and there when you’re too sick, or too tired, to continue. But running a business is a 7-day-a-week job. Your business will always be on your mind. You can’t escape it.

The good news is that when you figure out how to make your consulting practice fly, the rewards of all that work are definitely worth it. You get to follow your interests, work with a wider variety of people, help solve a wider variety of problems, and generally have more autonomy than when you’re working for someone else.

Even the cost of that autonomy, that you are wholly and solely responsible for finding ways to ensure you get a paycheck, is a reward in and of itself. It means that you have made a direct connection between the value you offer and the monetary measure of that value. It’s a connection few who work for others really get to make.

So the last 15 years have been amazing, humbling, fulfilling, exhausting, rewarding, challenging, and terrifying all rolled together.

I sometimes say that if I knew back when I started my company in 1997 what I know now, I probably would not have had the guts to do it. Yet I’m very glad I did. So if I could know not just what hardship lay ahead but also what satisfaction and joy there would be, then yes, I would do it all over again.

You can do it too, if that’s what you want.

It’s a wild ride. Your particular path will be different from anyone else’s, so you’ll have to find your own way. The whipsaw ups and downs and hard turns might make you a little green around the gills for a while. But if you can hold it together long enough, you’ll learn how to roll with it.

Being independent, or starting a company, isn’t for everyone.

Is it for you?

If you want to own your own professional destiny so badly that you’re willing to do whatever (legal, ethical, but exhausting) work it takes to make it through those incredibly rough first few years, then yes, yes indeed. It might be just the thing.

I know what metrics to use to manage a traditional phased project. But what metrics do you use on Agile projects?

I started drafting my answer in a private email but I decided that it was time to put my answer on the record.

This is a great question. Too many organizations transitioning to Agile don’t ask it. They continue using the same metrics they were using for traditional projects even though the process is fundamentally different.

The problem is that traditional measures don’t work in Agile. Sometimes they’re actively harmful.

Requirements coverage is meaningless if the definition of “Done” includes tested. The number will always be 100%. If it’s not 100%, you have a deeper problem that metrics will not help you solve.

Test pass/fail ratios are not useful. If a test that was passing starts failing, the team stops and fixes the regression right away.

Counting the defects found internally is not particularly helpful, unless it’s a big number, and then we stop to figure out why there are so many bugs.

Traditional QA defect ratio-based metrics, especially defect detection efficiency, can be actively harmful. It’s particularly horrific if the testers are being judged based on DDE. In every situation I’ve seen and heard about where that happened, the testers spent more time arguing about what was and was not a bug than actually helping to move the project forward.

So that’s what I don’t do. Before I launch into the metrics that I do use, there are some caveats I have to tell you.

First, I only use metrics to get a 50,000 foot view on what’s going on. They provide an indicator that there’s something to investigate, but they don’t give me enough understanding to make critical decisions. To make important decisions, I have to dig into the details.

Second, I do not use metrics to compare teams or individuals. Ever. This is important. The best way to screw up the usefulness of any process metric is to use it to judge people. This is a basic principle of metrics and has nothing to do with the development process. But apparently it’s something that needs repeating; I still see managers trying to use velocity or defect metrics to compare teams.

I even saw one manager institute the notion of “personal velocity” on an Agile team. He thought it was great. He wanted to know who the solid producers were, and he thought it led to greater attention to individual responsibility. But he was blind to the side effects: people did not help each other because they knew their own personal productivity would decline if they spent their time helping others.

Third, I am much more focused on qualitative than quantitative measures. Counting leads to the illusion that we can understand something because we can quantify it. But numbers can be very misleading. Worse, counting leads to perverse incentives all too often. Even when managers are not assessing people based on process metrics, counting things affects behavior.

I sometimes look at cycle time (the time it takes from when a story moves from To Do into In Progress to the time it’s Done). If the team is having difficulty producing Running Tested Features, measuring the cycle time of the simplest possible change is an enlightening diagnostic. If taking a tiny, self-contained, non-risky change all the way to Done takes more than an hour, then it’s not at all surprising the team can’t get real stuff completed. At that point I start digging to find out what the impediments are.

I use the Continuous Integration system to tell me about the health of the build. Sometimes if the build seems to be red a lot I count the time the build stays red, or the time the build has been green. (Think of a big poster: “Days since last build fail: 15″) But any time you count build metrics there is a risk of affecting checkin behavior. I’ve seen a team that is so scared of breaking the build that they stopped checking in altogether. Clearly this is not ideal.

I do measure code coverage on the unit tests. I don’t have any illusion that code coverage tools can actually tell me anything about how good the testing was, but if there are large swaths of code with no unit tests, I view that as technical debt and start paying it down.

I do pay attention to defects reported from the field. If there are enough of them, counting might be useful. But counting isn’t necessary. One of the more effective things I’ve seen is a support group that created visibility around field problems by posting the big ones on a big visible chart prominently located where everyone (testers, developers, executives, etc.) would see it.

I’m grateful. I use his ideas every time I set foot in a classroom or start consulting with a new client.

In particular, I channel my inner Dale whenever discussing any of the various controversial things I advocate, such as:

The whole team is responsible for testing and quality, not just QA or the designated testers.

If the regression tests aren’t automated and the team is having a hard time finishing all the testing within a sprint, have programmers help execute them.

Do away with traditional (and often punitive) defect metrics like % missed by phase. Focus instead on metrics related to accomplishments: story points completed, cycle time, and test coverage.

In many organizations these suggestions fly in the face of their accepted “best practices.” Such ideas also tread on political toes. So one response I hear a lot is: “That’s a nice theory, but it won’t work here.”

Before learning techniques for reframing that resistance into a resource, I would end up in a position based argument that amounted to the professional equivalent of “Will too!” “Will not!” “Will too!” “Will not!” Not useful.

Dale’s nicer and wiser than I am, so even when I don’t handle the interaction as well as I would like, by leaning on Dale’s techniques, I certainly handle the conversation better than I otherwise would have. (Although I’m far from perfect at this. Sometimes people succeed in pushing my buttons in such a way that I forget everything I know about how to communicate effectively.)

The first thing I need to know is whether the results of doing whatever it is would be useful. So I ask something like:

Do you think this practice could help improve things?

If I hear “No,” as the reply, we have a fundamental and possibly insurmountable difference in perspective. Nothing I can say will make them try the practice if they do not believe there is any value in it.

I can explore their reasoning. I can say, “That’s interesting. Why not?” But if someone flat out does not believe that a practice I advocate will help, and I disagree even after listening to their reasoning, there is a good chance that I will not be able to help them. Further discussion will cause more harm than good. The best thing for me to do is to stop.

On the other hand if I hear “Yes…but…” then we have a different conversation. First I have to understand what follows the “but…” Often it’s:

It won’t work here.

At this point I am tempted to ask, “Why not?”

But I don’t.

“Why not?” won’t get us anywhere. We’ll end up running down a rathole of excuses starting with “our context is different.” (And of course, they’re right. Their context is different. Every context is different.)

So instead of asking “Why not?” I flip it around. I ask:

What would have to change for this practice to work here?

Now we get a list of objections, but each one is framed as a neat little impediment statement.

It would need to allow for this inherent complexity in our situation.

We’d need to allow time for it.

We’d need executive support.

We’d need money in the training budget.

We’d need to get the programmers to buy in.

We’d need the QA manager to agree.

And we can work on each of those impediments in much the same way, following the trail of reasons why this is a nice theory that can’t possibly work in their real world context all the way down to the bottom.

In what way would it have to accommodate the complexity?

What would have to happen in order to make time for it?

What would have to happen in order to get executive support?

What would have to happen in order to get budget money?

What would have to happen in order for the programmers to buy in?

What would have to happen in order for the QA manager to agree?

The answers usually reveal perfectly practical steps. We can talk to the people in a position of authority or influence who can get us resources, training, budget money. We can try a small pilot. We can experiment with variations.

The simple reframe from “Why not?” to “What would have to change?” opens up possibilities. What could have become an argument becomes instead a brainstorming session. The result is a chain of steps we can take to go from where we are now to where we want to be.

A funny thing happened on my way to inbox 0 last week: I wrote a book in 4 days.

I didn’t mean to. And actually it’s not true to say that I wrote it in just 4 days. I assembled it in 4 days; I wrote it over 15 years. Allow me to present There’s Always a Duck, now available on Leanpub.

To fully explain, I need to back up a step.

Last Thursday I learned that Laurent Bossavit, who I admire tremendously, had published a work-in-progress book, The Leprechauns of Software Engineering, on Leanpub. Leanpub is a relatively new service designed to make it easy to publish before your book is complete so you can get feedback while you write. Their motto is “publish early, publish often.”

So I immediately purchased Laurent’s book. I found it to be a delightful read. In it he chronicles his attempts to track down the source of some of our most cherished beliefs: the cost of change curve, 10x productivity differential between star programmers and average programmers, etc.

Laurent’s current draft is 79 pages with many more sections outlined. And the nice thing about the way Leanpub works is that Laurent can keep writing, and I can re-download the book any time. Further, Laurent can notify everyone who bought the book when he’s made a substantial addition. I’m really looking forward to future drafts.

Since I hadn’t heard of Leanpub before, I was intrigued. I’ve investigated various other self-publishing channels including CreateSpace and SmashWords. But Leanpub seemed different. So I watched their introductory video, an XtraNormal animated short. Within a minute I was laughing out loud. 2 minutes into the 10 minute video I made myself a Leanpub account.

Leanpub made it absurdly easy to turn my blog into a book. They imported my content from my RSS feed and converted it from HTML into Markdown (the markup language they use for publishing). They put the resulting manuscript into a DropBox folder. I already use DropBox, so getting set up was absolutely trivial.

The result: within a few minutes of signing up, I had a 300 page book of my blog posts organized chronologically.

I started sifting through the content, deciding what would go into a book and rearranging the posts into chapters by topic. By Thursday evening I had a draft.

On Friday I had every intention of attending to my backlog of To Dos. But the book called to me. “I’ll just make a few tweaks,” I told myself.

As I continued arranging the content, I realized that some of my older content hadn’t been imported. Some of it was still on my blog but just wasn’t in the RSS feed. I manually pulled in a handful of older posts that I wanted to include in the book.

But I realized some of my oldest content was missing from my blog. Then I remembered that I’d purged all the really old content from my site and I discovered that I didn’t have backups. Whoops!

By this time I was feeling guilty about how much time I was spending on an unscheduled project. Thanks to Leanpub’s book announcement page and a few tweets, I had 30 people who had signed up to be notified when the book went live by Friday afternoon. I resolved to hold off on working on the book until at least 50 people indicated interest. So I set the book aside and worked on an overdue client proposal.

My resolution lasted all of 12 hours. Saturday morning found me hunkered over my keyboard, selecting and arranging content. By late Saturday night the book had come together into a cohesive draft. It just needed a good cover, a little more new prose, and another editing pass. I went to sleep at 1AM, tired but happy.

I awoke Sunday possessed with the idea of finishing. It was just SOOOO close. So I spent most of Sunday polishing the final bits.

The cover took a little longer than I had anticipated. I knew I had the perfect picture for it, a picture I took of a heated duck pond in front of the Finlandia concert hall in Helsinki during winter. But I couldn’t find the picture. My husband saved me: he found a copy of it on one of our old backup drives. Then I had to figure out how to reduce the image size so that a 500K download didn’t balloon to 4MB just for the pretty cover shot.

Despite the delays, it all came together within a few hours and I hit “Publish” on Sunday around 3PM.

So that’s how I published a book in 4 days.

Of course the marvelous thing about Leanpub is that while I’ve published, I can also update. I can fix mistakes (I’ve found a couple small wording glitches already). And I can even add entirely new content. So hitting Publish wasn’t much more nervewracking than publishing a blog post.

And yet it was.

This is a BOOK. An actual honest to goodness BOOK. The running joke between me and my friends for years has been “How’s that book coming?” I’ve been working on various books off and on for years. I’ve abandoned most of those projects. So this is a momentous occasion. Even if it is a self-published eBook, it’s still an important step.

Now that I’ve gotten the first one done, there will be more. I suspect that 2012 will be my year of publishing. I have other things in the works that I’m not ready to talk about yet.